Religion Dispatches
…ding up for rights, but about defaming a religion. If it were really about free speech, they would identify themselves, and they would, as Juan Cole has done, go after all religions to show the absurdity of Revolution Muslim’s position in a global world where there are no sacred cows. Both RM and the folks behind DMD miss the depth of feeling many Muslims have for their religion and Prophet Muhammad. I think that Eboo Patel has it right in his art…
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…ive. Yet, fantasy picketing in my imagination allows those of us who favor free speech (even free horrifying speech—remember Skokie and the Nazis) to express our outrage without giving up our commitment to free speech and, indeed, to express our outrage without being as offensive as those we find despicable. Not to mention avoiding the violence. And, of course, fantasy picketing gets around the many ways our culture has come to limit dissent in re…
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…and plunging the country I love into a Great Depression, I’d happily die.” Better for a whole lot more people to suffer and die than for the free market to be stifled any further. It’s the economy, stupid! Given the prevalence of religious voices among support for Trump, perhaps we could think about our situation with the ethics of religious responsibly as outlined above. A simple translation of “restart the economy” suggests itself: the economy o…
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…might, right and white privilege. Reagan truly believed that his notion of freedom—democracy, free markets and religious liberty—was God’s plan for America. He also believed that America was God’s tool for spreading freedom worldwide. In the years following his presidency, his vision was enacted through domestic and foreign policy. Welfare reform, trade agreements, and the War on Terror may have seemed to further neoliberal or neoconservative aims…
Read More…clichéd word turbulence, and free love, and things like that. But there’s free love in the 1920s; there’s free love in the 1930s; the beatnik movement in the 1950s. No one invented any of this. What was different in the 60s, according to Weiner, was that baby boomers were spoiled: plenty of education, money, entertainment; there was a war, but you could get out of it if you were lucky. This vision of unprecedented opportunity strikes me as fair;…
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…, but there was certainly a great amount of freedom—and not just religious freedom. There was freedom to sell anything you want, to buy anything you want, to be anything you want, to believe anything you want, and to create any kind of religion you want. You may be persecuted for that, as the Mormons were, but if you’re willing to take on that risk, go nuts! So, yes—because we could, we did. That’s part of it. But I’m skeptical that this fully exp…
Read More…settling,” by knowing Jesus Christ “in his fullness” can someone be truly free, free in the way that Jesus intended when he “set captives free” by the founding of the country. It’s all wrong, of course, historically, constitutionally. But Bachmann found the precise sweet spot where testimony and Christian American exceptionalism mythology intersect. Bachmann took her speech even further, invoking the biblical story of Joshua and Caleb, who led a…
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…christianized for its benefit, and our blacks themselves would be put in a better position.” Chief Justice John Marshall wrote: “The removal of our coloured population is, I think, a common object. The whole union would be strengthened by it and removed from a danger whose extent can scarcely be estimated.” (Free blacks weren’t the only danger: during the 1820s a few New York-based colonizationists associated with Columbia College also supported t…
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…, in recent years, this sweeping illiberal agenda has weaponized religious freedom to promote a militant, literal, and illiberal Christian ideology that embraces Christianity as a bedrock American identity. This agenda not only claims a special place for religion in American culture but demands that the laws of the land be based on Christian morals, ethics, and history. In other words, it has its sights set on the rights and liberties not of relig…
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…the two key issues at stake in its signing: First Amendment rights to the free exercise of religion and to free speech: I am very pleased to be signing this bill into law. The graves of our veterans are hallowed ground. And obviously we all defend our Constitution and the First Amendment and free speech, but we also believe that when men and women die in the service of their country and are laid to rest, it should be done with the utmost honor an…
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